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New Pattern Found In Prime Numbers

stephen.schaubach writes "Spanish Mathematicians have discovered a new pattern in primes that surprisingly has gone unnoticed until now. 'They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford's law. ... Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications in areas such as fraud detection and stock market analysis. ... Benford's law (BL), named after physicist Frank Benford in 1938, describes the distribution of the leading digits of the numbers in a wide variety of data sets and mathematical sequences. Somewhat unexpectedly, the leading digits aren't randomly or uniformly distributed, but instead their distribution is logarithmic. That is, 1 as a first digit appears about 30% of the time, and the following digits appear with lower and lower frequency, with 9 appearing the least often.'"

4 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Other bases? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    base-9 or base-11?

    NEVER FORGET

    that was awful. has it honestly been that long that it's okay to make such a joke?

  2. Re:Other bases? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Benson's Law is actually independent of the number base used.

    So this wild-ass statement about "Benson's" law gets modded informative? Nice going there, mods.

  3. Re:Other bases? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Clearly you have such a dizzying mathematical intellect that you can't even get the name of the law correct. It's Benford's Law. Perhaps you were writing his name in a different base?